In a mining work in a mine, a technology for performing a mining work by an unmanned machine in order to implement enhancement of the safety and reduction of the cost is demanded. In the mining site, it is necessary to dig the earth and sand and transport minerals and the earth and sand to the outside of the mining site. Although a work for transporting the earth and sand to the outside of the mining site is performed by a huge vehicle having a great earth and sand load amount such as a dump truck, since the transportation amount of the earth and sand per unit time is directly connected to the progress of mining, high speed, accurate and continuous transportation is demanded.
In an autonomous driving system in a mining dump, a route is determined on the basis of own vehicle position information by a position measurement apparatus such as a GPS apparatus mounted on a mining dump and map data of the mine, and autonomous driving control is performed such that an accident may not occur while the shape and the position of a running road surface and an obstacle are detected by external world recognition sensors attached to the vehicle.
A transport path on which a mining dump drives is as long as several km to ten and several km in a wide mining site or the like and is frequently maintained in an extent of approximately two lanes for back and forth passages in order to prevent increase of the maintenance cost for the transport path. Therefore, when a vehicle is stopped midway of a transport path from a reason such as a failure, a method wherein also a succeeding vehicle is disabled to operate and stops or a method wherein a succeeding vehicle is permitted to take over with the speed thereof limited in order to prevent a risk of collision with an oncoming vehicle is available.
Further, since a mine dump has a very great size and weight and it is difficult to perform sudden braking or steering, it is possible to achieve further enhancement of the safety by adopting occlusion control to perform control. In particular, if a virtual occlusion section is set to a transport path and occlusion control for permitting driving of only one vehicle in the set section is performed, then an accident such as rear-end collision can be prevented even if unexpected stopping or the like occurs.
On the other hand, if attention is paid to the vehicle side, dust, mad splash and so forth occur frequently on a transport path on which the vehicle drives in comparison with a common road, and a vehicle drives in a severe environment. Therefore, it is considered that the possibility that a detection performance for an obstacle and so forth is degraded by dirt or a failure of an external world recognition sensor increases, and a countermeasure against this is a significant subject.
As a background technology of the present technical field, Patent Document 1 is available.
In the prior art, a method is disclosed in which, when part of a transport path disables driving thereon because of a failed vehicle or an obstacle, only the speed limit within some section which includes a location at which driving is disabled is changed to prevent collision with an oncoming vehicle upon overtaking is prevented. Consequently, even in the case where such a failure occurs that the vehicle is stopped due to a failure of a sensor or the like, other vehicles can safely overtake the stopping vehicle and continue movement, and such a situation that even normal vehicles are stopped can be prevented thereby to raise the overall movement efficiency.
Meanwhile, Patent Document 2 describes that a state of a failure of a plurality of sensors for autonomous driving is detected and, when it can be confirmed that, in an abnormal case, the other sensors are normal, the vehicle drives to a retreat location without getting stuck. With such a technology as just described, when driving can be performed with the remaining normal sensors, the failed vehicle can be moved to a retreat place, and a disadvantage that the driving path is blocked can be avoided.